#041 - Not to be confused with Roy Orbison
It’s a funny thing about the Deep Space Nine pilot: they let two people have orb sects fantasias earlier-life visions, but only two of them. Which seems like kind of a tease, structurally: if there was only one vision quest sort of deal in the whole episode — Sisko’s flashback to his wife on the beach — then that’d feel totally fine and would if anything help underscore the uniqueness of his situation as the Emissary to the Prophets and yadda yadda.
But then they give Jadzia a quick trip back into her experience becoming a Trill host. Which sets up a conspicuous pattern, and gets me as the viewer thinking, okay, so this is part of how we’ll get a tiny glimpse of some backstory for this whole principal cast, that’s sort of clever in its own way, and–
But nope! After that, no more orbing in the episode. Everybody else just has to suck it up and do character defining things or work some expository humblebrags into their dialogue. (Yes, there’s the later Sisko And The Prophets thing that eats up the tail end of the pilot, but that’s just more Sisko and it’s not really the same Revealing Glimpse At Character vision thing in any case.)
The question in my mind then becomes this: did an earlier draft of the script have orb flashbacks for more characters, and they got trimmed for flow/time? Or did it have just the Sisko flashback but they felt they had to add one for Dax as well to reinforce her symbiosis visually and/or to establish more unambiguously that the orb was a multi-use vision machine or otherwise powerful/active artifact? Or was this two-and-out false pattern setup just the specific feel they wanted from early on?
Maybe I should blame Lost for depending so consistently and recently on the reinforcing “each episode will have a featured character flashback element” structure of its writing. For all my complaining there’s no reason that exactly two flashbacks should be seen as some kind of terrible crime against television plotting; I’m just kvetching freestyle here. But still: it does stand out to me. Pecks at my brain a little. It’s a little pecker. (Riker: [sassy grin])
tk
It's an undocumented feature of my brain that any time I write or say something critical, in basically literally any context, it tends to lodge in my memory as a thing to revisit and worry about and wonder if I was unfair or overstating my case or being like unjustifiably harsh or mean. Even for blandly, plainly reasonable and mild criticism. Most of those things won't become crystalized and spotlit by my brain on loop on a regular basis, but they basically all lurk around ready to show up again if something resonates.
Which I mention because I remember frequently being critical of this or that writing or editing decision in DS9 over the course of Larp Trek, and revisiting all these strips and blog posts is reminding the part of my brain that remembers I said critical things and it's doing a lot of vaguely anxious accounting and preemptive second-guessing of whether I landed that stuff fairly back in the day.
Realistically, I wrote this strip from a perspective of love, for the franchise and the characters, so I don't think I was actually being a dick at any point? I don't know why I would have ever wanted to. So it's just a free-floating anxiety sort of thing. But I do have the sense that there's a peril in backseat driving something as complicated as writing both the first episode and then the next 170 or so of a TV show, where it's very easy to pick at "oh but why THIS weird little thing" from what can end up being a presumptuous and self-excusing perch.
Long way to say I'm a little curious (read: anxious) to my various comments and see how well they feel like they hold up after the fact.